The totals here are subject to the usual margins of
error. They also contain all varieties of atrocity:
battle deaths, civilian casualties of war, democide,
famine caused by the economic disruption, etc.

Although each of these is a distinct event, many are closely inter-related.
Stalin (#3), Chiang Kai-shek (#6) and Mao Zedong (#2) were major players in
World War Two (#1), which was clearly a sequel to World War One (#4). The
Russian Civil War (#5), which paved the way for the rise of Stalin, was an
integral outgrowth of World War One. The anarchy that swept China following the
overthrow of the monarchy brought Chiang to power, put Mao in conflict with him,
and encouraged the Japanese invasion. The fall of the Japanese Empire following
World War Two left Korea up for grabs (#8), and Mao's army was among those who
tried to grab it.

It's very possible, therefore, that future historians will consider these
events to be mere episodes of a single massive upheaval -- the "Hemoclysm",
to give it a name (Greek for "blood flood") -- which took the lives of
some 155 million people. All in all, over 80% of the deaths caused by Twentieth
Century atrocities occurred in the Hemoclysm.

It divides neatly into two parts -- Eastern and Western. The Eastern
Hemoclysm began with the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in China in 1911
leading to 38 years of Civil War and a Japanese invasion. In 1949, the
bloodbath of the interregnum gave way to a greater bloodbath as the Communists
consolidated power under Mao (who died in 1976). When seen as a continuum, this
phase of Chinese history was a 65 year nightmare which took some 75 million
lives.

The first sparks of the Western Hemoclysm were the Balkan Wars (1912-13)
which quickly ignited the First World War. This brought down four of the most
powerful monarchies in Europe, leading to a power vacuum which was eventually
filled by the Nazis in Germany and the Communists in Russia, who came into
conflict during the Second World War. The death of Stalin in 1953 finally
extinguished the Western Hemoclysm after the loss of some 80 million lives.

If it weren't for the fact that the Second World War is considered to be a
single event, we could probably consider the Eastern and Western halves of the
Hemoclysm to be distinctly unrelated pieces of history.

A series of events which may or may not be related to the Hemoclysm are the
wars and massacres which ravaged Indochina from 1945 to 1980. The first of
these (1945-54) was obviously spawned by the Second World War, and we can easily
trace a chain reaction which led from this to the next and the next
(#24-#9-#14); however, each subsequent war took it farther and farther from the
central events of the Hemoclysm, so I have not included the 5 million
Indochinese dead in the total.

If we're going to be pointing fingers of blame for the savageness of the
Century -- and you know you want to -- raw numbers are probably not enough.
There have been plenty of episodes of concentrated brutality that don't show up
on the list above simply because the affected population is so small.
Meanwhile, a major reason that Russia and China stand so prominently at the top
of the list is that they have so many potential victims to begin with.
Therefore, I've taken all the episodes of mass killing of the 20th Century and
divided them by the population of the country that suffered the losses.

The 25 highest percentages of national populations killed during periods of
mass brutality:

If you look carefully at the chart with the intention of determining which
race, religion or ideology has been the most brutal, you'll see a pattern
emerge. It's quite a startling pattern, so I'd rather you find it by yourself.
Go back and take a second look. I'll meet you at the next paragraph after I
explain that, honestly, I did not manipulate the data. I
simply took the most likely death toll (military and civilian) among the natives
of each country (such as all the South Vietnamese -- ARVN soldiers, civilians
and Viet Cong -- who were killed in the Vietnam War), and divided it by the
population of that country (prewar). I didn't take, say, only the military
dead, or only the victims of genocide. I didn't arbitrarily decide to split one
horror into two in order to make each seem smaller (the only borderline case is
that I calculated the Russians dead from WW2 and Stalin separately. A judgement
call.), or eliminate countries of a certain size. No, I had no predetermined
point to prove. I did the math and let the chips fall where they would. (Here are the raw numbers if you want to
check behind me.)

That's why I was so startled to discover that there is absolutely no pattern
to the chart. If I had simply picked 25 countries out of a hat, I could not
have gotten a more diverse spread than we've got here. We've got rich countries
and poor countries; industrial and agrarian; big and small. We've got people of
all colors -- white, black, yellow and brown -- widely represented among both
the slaughterers and the slaughterees. We've got Christians, Moslems, Buddhists
and Atheists all butchering one another in the name of their various gods or
lack thereof. Among the perpetrators, we've got political leanings of the left,
right and middle; some are monarchies; some are dictatorships and some are even
democracies. We've got innocent victims invaded by big, bad neighbors, and
we've got plenty of countries who brought it on themselves, sowing the wind and
reaping the whirlwind. Go on -- take a third look. Find any
type of country that is not represented among the agents of a major blooding,
and probably the only reason for that is that there aren't that many
countries in that category to begin with (There are no Hindu or Jewish countries
on the chart, but then, there's only one of each on the whole planet, and
they're both waiting in the wings among the next 25.).

In a way, it's rather disheartening to realize that we can't smugly blame
the brutality of the century on the Communists, or the imperialists, or the
Moslem fundamentalists, or the godless. Every major category of human has done
it's share to boost the body count, so replacing, say, Moslem rulers with
Christian rulers, or white rulers with black rulers, is not going to change it
at all.